By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
When you score 18 threes and get the win, you can’t but be content, as Itoudis was: “First of all, I would like to congratulate my team. They played serious basketball; we were dominant and deserved to win tonight. We were the better team. Hitting 18 three-pointers is huge. Of course, this shows how serious we were. Of course, it is not every day that you shoot 18 of 27 [three-pointers], but also it is not normal for us to shoot, in some games, 5 of 22, 5 of 15 or something like that. We are not that bad and we are not this good. For sure, it was important that we had a different attitude on the defensive end in the second half. Overall, in the second half, we had a balance on offense, scoring 58 points in the first half and 52 in the second half. We shared playing time because we have back-to-back games and have to be alert, mobile and ready for the next task.”
CSKA Moscow‘s coach Ergin Ataman admitted that his team should have done much better: “It was a very bad game for us because we didn’t hustle and especially, we started the game with very bad defense, soft defense. We allowed incredible percentages, especially from three-point range, in the first quarter. We gave up on one-on-one defense, tried to help, especially after low post situations with De Colo against McCollum and then we recovered very slowly in the extra pass and we gave CSKA the aggressivity of the game. Only in the second quarter, we played a regular game, but we gave up on defense tonight.”